22+ Tax Preparation Service Marketing Ideas To Get More Clients

Most tax preparation services & tax professionals would agree that there’s nothing like finding a new client. New clients not only bring in immediate revenue, but also lifetime value since they are likely to return year after year. And in an industry built on trust, new clients also represent potential word of mouth referrals.

But it’s hard to find a good client if you don’t have new inquiries coming in.

Some tax professionals – especially those with a large, national brand – have a reputation and client base that brings in referrals and inquiries with nothing but a visible office.

But for most tax professionals and preparers, you have to go out and market your service to get a quality pool of potential clients.

I’ve consulted on search marketing for several local insurance agents* and many local service professionals. Based on those experiences, here are some tax preparation service ideas that you can use to bring in more clients.

*I’ve found that some local insurance agents are highly constrained by their national company franchise agreements. Tax professionals are often in a similar setup with the large national franchise brands. These constraints come with major marketing advantages, but also force you to be creative with your supplemental digital marketing. Some of these tactics might be unavailable for your service, but some just need a bit of tweaking.

Create City-Specific Website Pages

For many clients, regions are too big and neighborhoods are too small for the right tax professional, but they do want a local service in their own city.

That may sound obvious, but most professional firms that I’ve worked with still don’t focus their marketing on individual cities within a region. It’s a lot of work. It’s tedious. But it can still be worthwhile.

Make sure that every city page is actually about that city and includes all your services. Make your page structure “scalable” so that you can easily expand your service area as needed.

Create Niche Service Pages

Lots of clients have specific services and/or expertise that they want.

This is particularly true in an industry like tax preparation. For basic tax prep, there’s Turbo Tax and the 1040EZ form at the library. Lean into hyper-specific services and expertise.

Instead of listing your services & expertise in a giant list, make detailed pages about each expertise. Try to rank for searches like “tax [service]”.

You can use Google Suggest for ideas. Go to Google and type in “tax for” and hit space, but not enter. You’ll see some suggestions.

You can do this with the entire alphabet and as many modifiers as you can think of.

Create pages that match those search queries to show up when people search.

If you want to take this to the next level, you can use a tool like SEMrush’s Keyword Explorer to provide phrase match search terms in bulk.

Just type in a broad term and see what it’s comes up with.

Create Local Guide Pages

Create resource guides for people moving to or living in your city. Create lots of them.

Use Google Autosuggest to understand what people are searching for in your city.

Find niche tax questions, which vary State by State and jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

Make a local version for popular tax questions. You can also search for ideas outside of Google. Check out my guide to researching content here.

Develop Your Local Citations & Reviews

You should already have a Google My Business profile so that you can show up in Google Maps.*

*In fact, if you are a local professional who can’t run your own website, your Google My Business profile will be your primary search marketing tool.

But you can take it to the next level to show up even more prominently.

First, you can build your Google My Business profile with photos, posts, and full listing details.

Second, go to every local business listing site and make sure that your Business Name, Address, and Phone Number match exactly. Whether it’s on the Yellow Pages, Yelp, or elsewhere – everything must match. These are called your “local citations” and Google uses them to confirm the relevance of local business.

You can use SEMrush’s Local Listing Management Tool to audit all these listings quickly.

Third, create a local review strategy. Having diverse, unique, and regular reviews on your Google My Business page is the number one way to get more views (aka calls & inquiries) from Google Maps. There are many ways to get reviews, but you can use follow-ups emails, retargeting on social media, and many other methods.

Getting creative with reviews is how you’ll leapfrog other local competing tax professionals in search.

Fourth, you need to make sure your categorization is comprehensive and complete. Many listings offer varying and multiple business categories. If you are a tax professional with multiple services, makes sure you are listed in every database.

Steal Ideas from Large Local Competitors / Businesses

I’m not a fan of brainstorming. I think that it’s more effective to build off ideas that have already worked.

No matter your size, you can always look to larger competitors or larger businesses for inspiration.

With tax preparation marketing, make a list of local businesses that you *think* are being creative – including companies in different industries.

Like local listings and keywords, I then use a marketing tool like SEMrush to spy on those competitors. Type in the URL of a competitor below to see an example.

Here’s what you’ll see.

It looks like a lot. But drill down and categorize each link. You’ll quickly get a sense of what they are doing. You’ll see where they are posting on social media. You’ll see which media outlets have accepted press releases and what types of digital marketing they’re doing.

The trick here is *not* to copy cat them. Instead, take the general idea of what your competitors have done and make it your own – or, make it better.

Work with Local Publications & Blogs

Every city, no matter how small, has an interest in themselves. In Atlanta, where I live, we have a Curbed blog in addition to the AJC Blogs, Atlanta Business Chronicle, and dozens of smaller neighborhood newspapers and real estate blogs.

Find those and become a regular fixture. All local publications & blogs act on tips & press releases. Very few have a “boots on the ground” journalists. If you can be the place to provide inside information, free images, and consistent write-ups, you’ll earn attention and links.

In the tax arena, any statistics, trends, or data that you have can easily translate to free PR, which can then translate into links to your website or service profile.

That extra attention and those links will help every other idea on this list. Google loves links. Social media users find URLs via links.

Your city pages, service pages, and everything else on your website will benefit from more inbound links.

Use Hyper-Local Facebook Ads

A local business has one massive advantage against national brands trying to operate locally – you live in your city and understand it.

Facebook allows for hyper-local advertising. You can run ads that show within a radius of only a few miles. It’s tedious to set up, but it’s relevant and effective.

Learn how to create hyper-local targeting for demographics and geography to find lots of interested clients. Lean in to local tax problems.

For example, if you live in State affected by the SALT cap – talk about that. If you serve one of the cities with a wage / income tax – talk about that.

Whether it’s 529s, childcare, energy credits, find out what makes *your* area different and talk to the exact people that those tax considerations affect.

You can run small, targeted campaigns that show multiple places at once.

Use Hyper-Local Google Search Ads

Google Search ads are famously effective and famously expensive. The best client is someone who searches for “tax preparation in [city]”.

But that search click will be very costly.

In fact, some of the most expensive searches on Google are for tax queries.

You’ll be competing with huge, publicly traded national brands with near infinite budgets and an army of advertising professionals.

But like Facebook, you have an critical local advantage with Google Quality Score. Google will show ads higher if they are more relevant even if they don’t have the high bid.

Like Facebook, it’s tedious to set up, but if you can set up a hyper-local campaign, you’ll be able to get Google Search traffic that large competitors can’t bid on.

The key is to run landing pages that perfectly match your ads, and run ads that perfectly match specific, local keywords.

If you offer tailored or niche tax products, this strategy can be particularly useful.

Use Hyper-Local Google Display Ads

Google’s Display Network also offers opportunities for local advertisers who are willing to put in the work.

Google serves banner & text ads on some of the best ad locations on the Internet. Many placements are expensive for bulk ad buys.

But again, Google would rather serve a relevant ad with a low bid than an irrelevant ad with a high bid. That’s your opportunity to set up a hyper-local campaign focused on specific demographics in a specific area.

Even if you have a small market, you can always use Google’s Retargeting setting to solicit more reviews & referrals.

List on Locally-Popular Tax Websites

Tax & financial websites are a dime a dozen. They will send traffic to your listing. But they are expensive and require a lot of legwork.

The key is to find a few key financial websites that are popular in your area – and list on those.

You can use Google Trends, client interviews, SEMrush, or simply looking at the Google Search Results to see who is more popular for your city / neighborhood.

List on NextDoor & Local Forums

NextDoor is one of many local social media websites & forums. They are hard to find and hard to join, representing an opportunity for any local, enterprising tax professional.

These networks are interesting because they are specifically local and extremely relevant for professional services.

They also have an accessible, affordable, and useful local advertising service.

Automate Social Media Monitoring

Like Reddit, people often start their professional search on local social media with open-ended, specific questions.

It’s impossible to spend all your time on social media. But it is possible to automate both posting and listening on social media.

Take advantage of Twitter alerts, IFTTT, Zapier, and other tools to automate your social media presence and find great leads.

Contribute to Local Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a known resource for everyone. It relies on contributors – and authoritative contributors for local cities are often sparse.

Look for opportunities to use your website as an authoritative source for Wikipedia. A tax agency is well-positioned to provide historical documentation, legal background, and more for Wikipedia entries.

Don’t be over-promotional or spammy, but you can look to increase your presence there for the links and the potential exposure.

After all, if people are using Wikipedia for research, it’s a great place to have your website & brand.

Identify & Market Popular Client Sources

Take previous & existing clients and try to understand where those clients came from and how they found you.

See if there is a way to build off that success. It sounds cliche and obvious, but the key is in the execution. I’ve worked with plenty of professional firms who knew where they got clients from, but never thought about increasing that channel.

Cross-Promote Local Professionals

Local financial professionals usually have an incredible offline network, but have a poor online network. That’s the same with real estate agents, therapists, and other professional services. If you are investing in your online marketing efforts, try to develop a relationship to cross-promote as many local professionals as possible.

Cross-Promote Local Businesses

As an tax professional, you have the opportunity to stand at the nexus of lots of businesses & people. The key to most tax professionals is referrals. Try promoting other businesses in an effort to simply be top of mind for when the need for a tax professional happens.

Remember that even a link to your website from their website will dramatically help your other online efforts.

Coordinate Offline & Online Marketing

Take what your other marketing channels and drive them to specific landing pages with tracking. Create a marketing funnel rather than direct call to action across your on and offline marketing.

Use Events To Get Social Media Attention

Events like pro bono, Q&A sessions, seminars, college recruiting events are staples for many tax professionals. But events have a bonus effect online.

You can list them on multiple platforms to get extra exposure. Facebook is the best place for this tactic, but it also works on Google, Instagram, and event apps like Meet and Four Square.

Use Video Tours To Hack Social Media

Like events, most social media gives preference to video in their feeds. Take interesting video tours of tax issues with behind the scenes explainers.

Video can be hard, but that means you will get a competitive advantage if you can pull it off. Create “evergreen” videos about topics that will last.

Post the file natively to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Pay a small budget to boost it. And look for opportunities to embed it on your website.

Use Digital Referral Fees for Word of Mouth

Referral fees are also a staple of professionals’ marketing. But they don’t get the same reach as digital referral codes.

Whether you use a simple bit.ly link, manually hand out custom codes (i.e., client numbers), or use a software service – digital referral codes can help you move limited physical word of mouth to unlimited digital word of mouth.

Find & Sponsor Local Charities

Sponsoring local charities provides a few marketing benefits.

First, you can likely get a link to your website, which will help your other efforts. For many professionals, it’s the cheapest, simplest, and best way to promote your local listing & get links. You get long-term value for a short-term fee.

Second, you can tap into a well-networked organization with lots of word of mouth potential.

Third, you can tap into neighborhood goodwill to help with soliciting reviews to help with your Google My Business efforts.

Next Steps

There are a lot of marketing ideas out there for tax professionals and tax preparation services. You don’t have to do all of them. You just have to do one or two well.

Find the one that fits your interests & resources and give it a try. Learn based on your initial experience and improve.

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